Do you own or use a CNC machine?Are you building one? Or have you built one?

Here’s your chance to show it off!

Here’s the one I’m building

This will be a 4-axis machine X,Y,Z and a rotary A axis.Trying my best to afford an automatic tool changing spindle, but, we’ll see how that goes.Currently, I’m assembling the controller and drivers panel.Still lacking the x axis rack and pinion as well as the entire z-axis and spindle.You can follow my build blog here.

And here is one that pays the bills;

This is a machine that I’ve used several times to cut cabinetry projects. During the economic turndown, they let me lease it by the hour. I was cutting about 45 sheets in about 6 hours on it.It has a 5’ x 12’ table and a twelve position tool carousel, but no drill aggregate head.

This is nearly identical to the machine I’ve programmed for employers for many years though many of them have the drill aggregate head.

Doug the dust collection is not in the picture but, as of now, I have been using the Shopbot dust shoe, actually a very poor design (see below), and my Craftsman shop vac which seem to be very good except for MDF when the humidity is low and static seems to take over. I have cut oak, birch, maple, pine, ABS, lots of acrylic, and tempered hardboard without any dust issue.

I have a “tent” made of 5 mil plastic sheeting and supported by T Slot and 80/20 extrusions attached to the rear of the Shopbot frame, over the top, and down the front. I did this not so much to keep the cutting dust in but to keep California (the dust in this desert). Sorry don’t have a picture of this.

The problems with the Shopbot dust shoe are:

The shoe connected to the back side of the Z axis and held in place with a thumb screw which is only accessible when the Z axis is about 2” above the spoil board.

Because the duct to the shoe is a “ovalized” (a circular flexible dust tube pressed out of shape) it does cause issues with hold downs in the area that this ovalized portion traverses.

The shoe itself gets in the way when locating XY visually.

It is also in the way when changing bits.

And because of those issues I have been thinking about the Kent CNC dust shoe , shown below.

Or using the design from Instructables which looks a lot like the one from Kent CNC, and/or making my own (one of the nice things about a CNC)!

its not the size of the ship.. lol.. Yeah it does great for cabinets/ full sheet work.. Not sure how some cabinet guys get by without one… I just wish I could figure out a way to add a second z car with a sander..

SugarbeatCo, I am sure this will come in very handy in your shop!I bet you can’t wait to start cutting.

It took me quite a while to get over the “first piece” jitters. Now it’s the first tool I consider but I am still learning. In my opinion, there is a lot more to learn about a CNC than any other shop tool which is sort a a ”DUH!” statement.

Yes mine is the Arty. I can tell you I’m happy with it. I’m happy with Legacy and the support I get from them. They can be a little slow to answer sometimes but any issues I’ve had they’ve been able to get me on track.

I was down to the Shopbot versus the Legacy myself. The ultimate deciding factor between the two came down to the location of the factory and the fact that Legacy came to a woodworking show near me and brought their machine. To this day I’ve still never seen a Shopbot in person. The Legacy factory is in Utah and Shopbot is on the east coast and I’m in California. So I could have flown all the back east, got my factory training, and then came all the way back and paid for shipping from my machine, or I could drive to Utah in my motorhome with my truck in tow, get my two days of factory training, load the CNC in my pickup that was towed behind my motorhome, and bring it home without paying close to a grand for shipping. So I chose the Legacy.

The only draw back to the Legacy Arty is you are limited to an 18” width, but for what I build that’s really all I need. If you want a machine to cut parts out of a 4×8 sheet of MDF then the Arty isn’t for you, but Legacy has machines that will do that too. But I’m not a cabinet maker so I don’t do that anyway. A 24” width would have been much nicer than the 18” width, but as you know with the precision of the cut you can make things in parts too and glue them up. I have made 24” diameter lazy Susan’s and I did so by cutting out two half circles and gluing them together. You can see this in one of my project photos. It makes for an extra glue step, but I still got a perfect circle out of it.

I hope to build my own CNC router soon, but I have a little CNC milling machine. I won’t show pictures because it is likely outside the scope of your question. But CNC really is not all that bad. Some people think it is a huge learning curve, but I would put it at moderate if you are computer savvy and mechanically inclined.